


The Ghosts of Blackheath

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Memory Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, References to temporary death, Sexual Content, Spoilers for the premise but not for the mystery's solution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 08:29:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20079199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: After escaping Blackheath Aiden read everything he could get his hands on about memory loss, but nowhere in any of the books he's read does it say anything about what happens when a man’s memories are suppressed and the lives of seven strangers crammed into the resulting empty space.





	The Ghosts of Blackheath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kingstoken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingstoken/gifts).

> Halfway this book I started shipping these two and thinking about nominating them. Then I checked nominations and found I'd been beaten to it. I'm so happy to have had the chance to write about them in all their messy, complicated glory. I also knew right from the start that I wanted to try to capture something of the novel's unusual structure. I hope I've succeeded and that you enjoy it.

**The Ghosts of Blackheath**

** **

**1**

** **

3.23 p.m.

Aiden never saw quite how the vase came to smash, only that one moment Anna was at the sink filling it with water, and the next she started, and lost her grip on it. She stumbled back, her face shining with dismay as it fell and shattered on the granite floor.

"Damn it, you make me jump." She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and stared at him for a moment, her expression unreadable, before she knelt and began to gather up the larger shards, dropping them into the base of the vase.

"Hang on." Aiden rooted through the cupboards in search of a dustpan and brush. It was all wrong, this kitchen, glossy white surfaces and gleaming chrome, when what it ought to be was oak and cosy gloom, and he could never find anything, not even the mechanisms for opening the bloody cupboard doors. Anna drew in a sharp breath, and he turned, saw her bringing her thumb to her lips. "Did you cut yourself?"

"It’s nothing."

"Let me see."

"It’s  _ fine _ , Aiden, really..."

But he was already kneeling beside her and taking hold of her wrist and she didn’t fight him. He turned her hand upwards towards the light, the shards of glass sparkling around them. The wound wasn’t deep; it was bleeding, but not badly, and his hand cradled hers for a moment, his thumb resting lightly in the hollow of her palm. When he looked up he found her watching him, her eyes guarded and vulnerable. Anna’s eyes, even if the rest of her face was that of a stranger.

"It doesn’t look too bad," he said, and still he didn’t let go of her hand.

"I told you," she said. She was staring at him keenly now, studying him. "What’s wrong?"

Aiden hesitated, looked away. He ran his tongue around his mouth, and to buy a little time twisted his hand in hers, entwining their fingers together. "There’s something I need to tell you," he said, and found he couldn’t get any further.

"Aiden, you’re frightening me. What is it?"

The silence stretched out like a rubber band, well past the point of snapping, until it was almost painful. All the voices in his head pressed at the inside of his skull, clamouring at him. Too long, damn it; he’d left it too long.

"Only that I love you," he said finally. The relief he felt at bringing the silence to an end was almost certainly misplaced, but she smiled and looked genuinely relieved as he added, "Very much," and pulled her close to kiss her cheek. He brought his lips down, trailing them down the sharp angles of her cheekbones to the corner of her lips where he planted a soft kiss, then a slightly harder kiss. "Why don’t you go out for a bit? I’ll clear up here."

"The flowers..."

"Don’t worry about the flowers. I’ll deal with them." He watched her as she left, then gathered together the largest shards of glass, tracked the dustpan and brush to their hiding place and swept up the rest. He searched through the cupboards for something that’d serve as a vase, but the only thing that was even remotely suitable was a cheap, blue plastic picnic jug. It would look absurd, but he stripped off the cellophane and arranged the flowers in the jug, then set it in the middle of the dinner table, a painfully expensive piece of furniture fashioned from reclaimed railway planks, with horribly uncomfortable bench seating on either side. A month they’d been staying in the cottage, and they hadn’t eaten a full meal at that table once.

That done, he sank down on the bench. The remainder of the vase glimmered at him from the kitchen counter. There was a sensation in his chest, like a living thing pressing against the inside of his ribcage, struggling to free itself. He recognised it distantly, distractedly, as panic. He’d liked that vase, and there was part of him, still, whispering in his ear that it didn’t matter. All he had to do was go to sleep and the damn thing would be like new again.

But that wasn’t how the world worked outside of Blackheath. There were no second chances.

These days if something broke beyond repair it stayed that way.

** **

4.43 p.m.

It was the tail end of summer, the air warm and humid, heavy with the promise of a long-awaited thunderstorm. The track that led to the beach was deeply rutted, the mud baked to a dry, cracked crust. There were no cars in the trampled patch of scrubland that passed for a car park, and no sound but the crickets chirping in the long yellowing grass, the surf, and the gulls, and the occasional drone of an aircraft overhead. At least, not until Aiden reached the edge of the pebbled beach, and then the quiet was broken by the crunch of the stones shifting beneath his weight.

Ahead the sea was on its way out, stretching out towards the horizon, framed between walls of white chalk cliff. He half-slipped down the slope, pebbles skittering ahead of him until the incline began to level out.

Anna’s towel was stretched out on the pebbles like a discarded skin from a previous life, her belongings scattered on top of it: a canvas beach bag; a broad-brimmed straw hat; sun glasses; a paperback open and face-down on the towel. No sign of Anna. The sun seemed too bright. His heart pounded as he stared at the water, searching for her, afraid of…

_ Afraid of what exactly? _

A moment later he spotted her head bobbing in the water. She was further out than he’d expected, far enough out that his throat tightened, his memories of drowning still a little too keen. He couldn’t seem to shake his fear of the water, his fear that Thomas Hardcastle might be waiting for him, just beneath the surface. Another nasty little trick of Blackheath’s, that, calling ghosts into being as well as the long-dead living.

But Anna seemed fine, cutting through the water with practised ease, so he sank down on the towel.

A wasp crawled across the cover of the paperback, and he brushed it away. One of his:  _ Death on the Nile.  _ He’d developed something of a taste for classic Agatha Christies since they were freed, although he had no memory of enjoying them before. Perhaps he’d always been a fan. Perhaps he’d already read every single one, although if that were the case, it meant that one of the few silver linings of the whole messy business of Blackheath was that it had made him forget who all the killers were.

He wished he knew the truth, whether he really did have a taste for them before, or if this was some lingering preference of one of his hosts, one of the many habits he’d picked up. Oliver had implied that these phantom proclivities would eventually fade, but instead they seemed to be cementing themselves.

Seven dead men, taking up residence in his body as he had taken residence in theirs, living on through him. Bastards, the lot of them.

The crunch of feet on pebbles. He looked up from the page, squinting as the sunlight hit his eyes. Anna, making her way awkwardly across the stones, her skin shining with seawater, her hair a tangled halo about a face in silhouette. Her feet were encrusted with wet sand. She stopped a couple of yards away, and when she spoke her voice was quiet and desperately sad.

"What was it that you were really going to tell me?" she asked.

** **

**Interlude**

** **

He goes back to Blackheath almost a month after their escape. Doesn’t even realise that’s where he’s heading until he recognises the road, not the tricksy labyrinth he stumbled into as Donald Davies, but a perfectly normal A road, shaded by stooping trees. Nor is Blackheath the crumbling ruin he remembers, but a fine stately home, renovated and owned by the National Trust, with a gift shop and a cafe that sold afternoon tea. One of England’s few remaining treasures.

It isn’t just the state of repair that’s different, although it takes him a long time to put his finger on just what is niggling him.

The house is an imperfect copy, even disregarding the renovations that have been made. Some of the angles are subtly different. The ceilings are too high. Door frames stand in the wrong places, only a couple of inches off from from where he expects them to be but enough that he almost walks into a door frame several times. And while the staircase appears to be the one he remembered, he keeps stumbling and losing his footing, and he finally determines it must be because the steps are a trifle too shallow.

It feels like a film set, an imperfect facsimile, meant to appear real until you look closer. Although, of course, it’s the Blackheath he remembers that was the film set. This open, airy well-maintained house is the real thing.

It’s a sensation he doesn’t much like, and he’s already wishing he hadn’t come, but he snaps a couple of photos to show Anna later: the house and the rose gardens in bloom; the reflecting pond where Evelyn shot herself. He’s aware, as he wanders the grounds with a growing sense of dread, that he will never show her.

He already knows memories can’t be trusted. He’s read everything he can get his hands on about memory loss – books about Alzheimer’s and anterograde amnesia and how memories are stored and retrieved, and the many and varied ways those functions can break down.

Of course, nowhere in any of the books does it say anything about what happens when a man’s own memories are suppressed and the lives of seven strangers crammed into the resulting empty space.

His brain has tried to make sense of the muddle, stitching those memories together like a patchwork quilt. Remarkable, really, but it fills him with a strange pang of longing for Blackheath of all the godforsaken places; it might have been terrifying, hellish, and bewildering in many ways, but at least he never once doubted what was real the way he does these days.

It makes no sense. How can something that was essentially a simulation, a shallow recreation of something that happened over a century ago, still feel more real than the real world?

** **

**2**

** **

03.19 a.m.

Aiden woke her, screaming out in the grip of a nightmare. He jerked up, breathing hard, sat trembling for a moment with his head in his hands. Anna glanced at the bedside clock, then placed her hand on his back, tried not to flinch when he swung around to look at her.

His eyes were hollow, his face pale and drawn. Several days worth of stubble darkened his jaw. He hadn’t recognised her, she thought. and her dismay sharpened to fear, because perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps he knew very well who she was, only did he think her Anna or Annabelle?

She touched his arm. "Aiden?"

He stared at her. His hands clenched reflexively on the bed covers, and she thought of those hands closing around her throat. It was so sharp and clear, that image, that it could only be a memory.

How many times had he murdered her over the years they’d both been imprisoned? Ten? Twenty? A hundred?

Aiden was convinced that version of himself was long gone, just as he believed Annabelle Caulker was gone, subsumed in the better, kinder people they’d become. Mostly she agreed, because what else could she do? But on nights like this, in the interstitial no-man’s-land between sleep and wakefulness, the doubts came creeping in. She couldn’t remember much of Blackheath beyond fragments. It had faded like a dream soon forgotten after waking up, and what remained were mostly scraps from a life that wasn’t her own, the life of the little mouse who had been reduced to a passenger in the back of her own head. She rose up from time to time, that little mouse, usually with a nugget of utterly useless information: as if Anna was ever going to need to know how to polish silverware in an age of dishwashers and stainless steel cutlery.

But that wasn’t quite all she remembered. She remembered the moment when Aiden betrayed her. She’d clung to it through god knew how many lives, and even now they were free, she couldn’t let go of it; it had been carved on her bones, right down to the marrow. How many loops had she passed it along, like a baton in a relay race? Enough loops that the sharp edges of his anger and hatred could be filed away, enough that he was able to let go of his vengeance and start to forgive her. It had to be thousands.

Unless…

No. That was a path she couldn’t let her mind wander down. Let herself think like that and everything would crumble. So instead she moved closer to him. He tensed, as if about to draw himself away from her, but he didn’t move. She cupped his cheeks, and brought her face close to his, repeating his name until that awful expression cleared from his face, and he murmured hers in reply.

"Anna?"

She smiled, not allowing her surge of relief to show on her face. "I’m here." This man had freed her, had forgave her, had given her a second chance. Where on earth else would she be?

** **

8.14 a.m.

By the time Aiden emerged from the bathroom, Anna was in the kitchen, eating breakfast, a couple of rounds of toast, scraped with butter and marmalade, thick and sharp and studded with shreds of orange peel like flies trapped in amber. She’d made coffee too, the sleek inbuilt percolator filling the kitchen with the bitter, mouthwatering smell. Aiden, they’d both discovered through trial and error, preferred tea, so she was only making it for herself, really, but then again the last thing she needed was more caffeine. She felt restless, unable to sit still and relax for more than a few minutes. She kept jumping up to wipe a mark from the gleaming white surface or brush away some crumbs. She was still dressed in her lounge clothes, a silk kimono over yoga pants and a dove-grey top in a butter-soft silk-cotton jersey mix. All bought by Aiden.

They’d left all their old clothes behind. They hadn’t fled, exactly, but there had been a certain haste about their leaving. Aiden was wealthy, as it turned out, and as he’d liquidated most of his capital before entering Blackheath, a considerable fortune awaited them. She’d had plenty of cash at her disposal too once, but of course that had all been confiscated, her accounts frozen. No doubt there was something squirrelled away for a rainy day, but without reclaiming her memories she’d never find it. She was essentially destitute, unable to rely on the arrangements the Facility had in place for their prisoners once they were freed, because if she was found, she’d be a dead woman. This Aiden had impressed upon her without ever going into details about the reason why she was so hunted. It’s not important, he’d told her, and she’d nodded and squeezed his hand, and pretended to agree.

They’d left with virtually nothing but their identity documents, both the originals and the new documents that had been created for them. Even the clothes on their backs were borrowed, and she’d felt like a snake shedding its skin, leaving part of herself behind like a dried-out husk.

She wiped down the sink, polished out the water marks on the ceramic, ran the corner of the cloth around the edge of the plughole as though mould and grime might be hiding there, then glanced up as Aiden came in. He was fully dressed, wearing dark jeans and a casual t-shirt, sunglasses hooked over the neckline, presumably in case he felt he needed a disguise.

Aiden had once raised the possibility of cosmetic surgery in general terms, if not in specifics, although he worried that might cause more problems than it solved, bringing more attention her way. Anna suspected that once upon a time she might have known exactly which rocks to turn over to find a cosmetic surgeon who could be trusted not to betray her, if not for the sake of medical ethics, then for filthy lucre. And quite possibly out of the desire to not get knee-capped as a prelude to a slow and painful death.

It was a horrible thought, and not something that belonged to little mousy Anna, but to the other one, whom she would forever think of as Annabelle Caulker, as if by doing that she could put distance between them. As if it was possible to put distance between yourself and another person when you were literally wearing the same skin.

"You’re going out?" she said, throwing the dishcloth onto the never-quite-spotless-enough draining board.

"Some errands to do in town." He was smiling fondly, but there was caution in his eyes. "Do you want me to bring you anything back?"

She shook her head.

** **

9.25 a.m.

When Aiden had gone, Anna pulled out a cylinder from where she’d hidden it at the back of the wardrobe. She uncapped it and unrolled it, smoothing it out into a gleaming black rectangle on her knees. With a wave of her fingers above the surface, it sprang alight, the surface igniting with fireworks at the slightest movement of her fingers.

She felt an itching tug at her temple as the tablet quested the air, searching for a more direct connection than manual operation, but both she and Aiden were off-line these days. She glanced up towards the door, expecting Aiden to have returned unexpectedly, but he wasn’t there. A tickling warmth tracked down her face, matching the muscles and bone structure to its records, and as it checked, her eye was displayed in the glossy black surface, reflected a thousandfold, like the eyes of Argus in the tail of a peacock.

It found a match and opened its mysteries to her.

Anna never felt so divided than she did at moments like this. While part of her, the part that was still a 1920s primitive who thought it nothing short of magic, marvelled at this miracle of technology, an equal part looked on quietly, regarding that ignorant primitive with contempt.

And yet it all came back to her so easily, the sparse elegant movements of her hand, like a conjuror performing a magic trick, sweeping through window after window until she found her own face and more: here, on an anonymous forum a clamour of voices baying like hounds for her death. Fewer of them now, thirty years on, and perhaps a little less savage, the screams for her to be strung up tempered by the devil’s advocates who wanted to debate the morality of her cruel and unusual punishment.

She read whatever fresh posts she could find in a sort of numbed horror, as always unable to connect it with herself. This indifference terrified her. She couldn’t tell whether it was something within her, some loose connection that didn’t quite connect up and never would, or if Aiden was right and it was merely a sign that the part of her that had done those terrible things – Annabelle Caulker – was truly dead.

_ Annabelle Caulker. _

The most common photo, the one on all the sites, was the mug-shot from when she was arrested. Younger than the face she saw in the mirror, but not by much. The face was devoid of make-up, the hair tied back. She wore a wild half-mad smile that made the muscles in Anna’s cheeks ache just to look at it, and the eyes were hard. Not Anna’s face. Not Anna’s smile, either, no matter that the wrinkles etched in that face were her own. They didn’t seem to match the facial muscles she used these days.

Annabelle Caulker held her head tilted at an angle, and seemed to be staring, not at the lens of the camera or at the camera man, but through them, directly at the woman she would become. And while it hurt, while she suspected that Aiden, if he knew about it, would think of this furtive spying on her old self as a kind of self-harm, it still helped. She needed this. Because when she was lost, when she’d taken turning after turning and no longer knew which way safety lay, this reminder of how estranged she was from the person she’d been was the anchor point on which she could hang the guide-line to lead her back through the labyrinth.

It didn’t seem to matter that the face worn by the monster lurking at the labyrinth’s heart was her own.

** **

**Interlude**

** **

He doesn’t recognise her at first, slick with fluid and unsteady on her feet as a newborn foal. She’s on her knees and forearms on the poured concrete floor, gasping for air. Her dark hair is cropped short and lies slick against her skull like the skin of a seal.

_ It’s not her, _ he thinks.  _ It’s not her. _

"Anna," he says, or tries to say. His voice seems to come from very far away. The air feels wrong. Too heavy. There’s a crushing sensation in his chest, and it won’t be until much later that he realises that’s because they are several storeys underground. Somewhere an alarm is beeping, muffled by the fluid clogging his ears.

The woman coughs again, fingers hooked into claws on the concrete, then she lifts her gaze towards him. Her eyes are large and wide and very dark. She stares at him, her gaze flicking over his face, taking him in. She looks numb. Stunned. And that’s a look that he recognised.

It’s her. It’s Anna. They’re out. They’re finally free. And he starts to cry.

He doesn’t know how long passes before they are allowed to leave. They aren’t prisoners, he’s told. They’re free to go. But somehow it always seems like there’s just one more question, another form to fill in in triplicate. And tests too, an endless battery of tests: blood pressure, and lung function, and reflexes, and then someone says they’ll be back in a minute, and he’s separated from Anna and left to wait with no way of telling what time it was, no clock, no windows. It could be minutes or hours. It feels like days.

He paces the room until he finally works up the courage to try the door and finds it locked. In a fury, he hammers on it, hammers and kicks and bellows until he hears footsteps and the door opens. A thin pinch-faced man, who can’t quite keep his expression impassive, frowns at him.

"Where’s Anna?" Aiden demands. "What are you doing with her?"

"She’s with our medic, Mr Bishop. You’ll see each other again soon."

"I want to speak to the Plague Doctor."

The man gives him a perplexed look. "The what?"

"The Plague Doctor," he says, and there’s a sick dropping moment in his belly when he can’t remember the bloody man’s name. Then it comes to him. " _ Oliver _ . I want to see Oliver--"

"I’m here, Mr Bishop."

The Plague Doctor has divested himself not only of his porcelain mask but also of the greatcoat. His face is sallow beneath the fluorescent lights. Despite the familiarity of the voice, Aiden is momentarily stunned at the sight of him, as if he’s been followed out of a dream. Oliver offers him a weary smile and his hand, and Aiden shakes it.

"A pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh," Oliver says, and the words finally sting Aiden into action.

"I want to see Anna. Now." He thumps his fist against the wall. "We want to leave."

"Of course you do," Oliver says, and his voice is as soft as if he’s trying to soothing a fractious child. Aiden, disoriented and with a dizzying chasm in his memories, not to mention a skull filled with voices, has to admit it’s not necessarily all that far from the truth. "But tell me, Mr Bishop, where is it you mean to go?"

He has no answer to that.

And then it’s back to the interminable waiting, but this time at least the door has been left unlocked. Aiden keeps testing it, trying the handle and glancing out into the dingy soulless corridor. He hears footsteps from time to time, and once the sound of raised voices, the words impossible to make out. They offer him coffee, which turns up barely lukewarm in a flimsy polystyrene cup. And then a sharp rap on the door, and the woman he can hardly believe was Anna is ushered inside by the same pinch-faced man. She looks frightened, stares at him as if she doesn’t recognise him until he says her name, uncertainly, as if he isn’t quite sure himself, and then she’s in his arms, pressing her face into his shirt. She’s showered, smells of the same sharp anti-bacterial shower gel he does, her hair still damp.

"I thought you’d gone," she says. "I thought you’d left without me."

"Never," he says, cupping her cheeks, and it isn’t until that moment that he realises how deeply he means it. He kisses her, lips, cheeks, forehead, the salt of her tears from her cheeks. " _ Never _ ."

** **

**3**

** **

7.35 a.m.

Would he ever be able to look in the mirror and not feel that the face staring back at him was wrong in some indefinable way?

His cheekbones were too angular, the hair an irritatingly indecisive shade somewhere between a half-hearted fox-red and a dirty blond, shot through with a few stands of grey at the temples. His facial hair was a couple of shades closer to red. The eyes were similarly indecisive, the colour of the sea, neither grey nor green nor blue – they seemed to shift with the light.

No one had bothered to tell him whether it would wear off, this feeling of looking in the mirror and seeing a not-quite-stranger staring back. It was, by all accounts, his face. His  _ actual _ face, the one he’d been born with, more or less. That, he was fairly sure of (although on those nights when he couldn’t sleep and couldn’t be certain the world wouldn’t reset itself at the stroke of midnight, he’d considered the possibility he was wrong), but that didn’t make it any less ill-fitting.

It was too young for a start. This body had been kept on ice, stashed away in an underground facility somewhere off the M1 while his conscious mind stumbled its way through countless lives. Aiden might have aged, but his body hadn’t aged with him; it had stayed the same, frozen in time. It ought to be a pleasant experience finding out he was really thirty years younger than he thought he was, if only for reasons of vanity, but instead it was disconcertingly unpleasant. It was a jarring sensation looking in the mirror and seeing a too youthful version of himself, almost worse than any of the other faces he’d worn.

He lathered up with the old-fashioned shaving kit, another ridiculously out-of-date habit he was struggling to shake. Inside him, Ravencourt was recoiling at the concept of shaving himself.

Aiden’s memory from before Blackheath remained elusive, but he did get occasional flashes from time to time, although often it was impossible to work out whether they truly belonged to him or to his hosts. In this case, however, he knew for certain, for the very simple reason that he’d preferred to use an electric razor, and they hadn’t been invented until the 1930s. Now, after Blackheath, he couldn’t stand them. He found them a poor substitute for a decent wet-shave; they left his skin irritated and itching, and the shave was never quite close enough.

A wet-shave by a valet would be best of all, of course, Ravencourt helpfully supplied.

"Oh, shut up," Aiden muttered, picking up the safety razor.

"I’m sorry?"

He glanced around, a little sheepish. Anna stood in the doorway, staring at him. She looked tired, and no wonder – they both slept badly these days.

"Just talking to myself." He felt a sharp sting as the blade of the razor nicked his skin. "Ow."

She sighed, seeming to come to some decision, and came into the bathroom. She took the razor from him and gently pushed him down to sit on the edge of the bath. There was a firm press to her lips, a familiar expression of resolution on her face, as she pressed beneath his chin, tilting his head up. Gently, she set the blade of the razor to his throat, drew it smoothly across his skin. Aiden opened his legs, let her nestle between them, his mouth dry.

She shaved him with care and precision, her eyes on her work, brows knitted in concentration. Her gaze only occasionally flitted up to meet his in the moments when she rinsed off the razor. And finally she turned her attention to the patch of stubble beneath his lower lip, her thumb pressing against the corner of his mouth. The razor rasped over his skin in a delicate movement. Aiden parted his lips, letting her thumb slip inside, and caught it between his teeth. Anna put the razor down and his hands tightened on her hips, pulling her in for a kiss, wondering when he should tell her that he was planning on heading out, whether she would look at him and see the guilt writ large on his face.

** **

11.40 a.m.

"I feel like a time traveller," Aiden said.

Oliver considered this. "In a way, I suppose you are. It’s hardly surprising you’d find yourself out of step with the world. You  _ were _ asleep for thirty years."

"More like thirty years going on a hundred and thirty."

"Ah."

They were leaning on the railing of the promenade, watching the sunlight glisten on the water. Aiden wished he’d had the foresight to wear something cooler – he was sweltering in his jeans and shorts might have made him feel less inconspicuous. The town had been quiet enough in the off-season, but it was midsummer now and very definitely the  _ on _ -season. The scalloped beaches, sectioned off by looming groynes, swarmed with holidaymakers trying not to look relieved at the sunshine. The tide was on its way out, leaving a narrow stretch of smooth wet sand shining like a mirror between the pebbles and the foamy surf.

Oliver sighed fretfully. "We ought to have foreseen this. If you’d been in there for a shorter period or had fewer hosts…"

"It doesn’t affect everyone like this, I take it?"

"A little at first, perhaps, but usually people adjust very quickly." Oliver hesitated. "Of course, if you were to change your mind about retrieving your memories--"

"What good could that possibly do?"

"Very little, I suspect, although..." Oliver trailed off, clearly thinking better of whatever it was he’d been about to say. Aiden considered pressing the issue, but suspected it was probably better not to, for now.

On the beach children were shrieking, dancing back from the oncoming wave. Some things never changed. It wasn’t like the cities, with their gleaming glass and neon, the world he’d once been part of showing him what an anachronism he’d become. Thirty years was a long time in London.

"It’s changed here, but not that much. My parents used to bring me here as a child every summer from when I was very young," he said, and thought,  _ Us. They brought us here. _

They’d used to stroll along the promenade, him and Juliette and presumably their parents too, past the Martello tower to the beaches that nestled in the lea of the white chalk cliffs. At that end of the seafront the retreating tide would draw back like a curtain to reveal dark jagged rocks, slippery with weed and studded with barnacles, where seawater pooled in the hollows and crevices. He could remember Juliette flinging out her arms for balance, the sunlight shining through her wind-whipped strands of hair.

Oliver made a non-committal noise. "How’s Anna?"

"She’s well. Considering." He scowled, suddenly furious. "No, actually, she isn’t all right at all. She’s suffering and I can’t do a damned thing to help her."

"You knew it wouldn’t be easy."

"’I told you so’, Oliver? I didn’t think you’d stoop to that."

"Allow an old man a few indulgences."

"I’m worried about her, that’s all. I honestly don’t think my previous self" – _ the real Aiden Bishop, _ his mind helpfully supplied – "ever meant to come back. But it’s worse for Anna."

What was there for her in this world but Aiden? At least he could hope to rebuild his life, forging new relationships to replace the ones he might have –  _ must have _ – destroyed. He would have severed any ties without hesitation or remorse. Aiden suspected that if he’d ever met the man he’d been he wouldn’t have liked the bastard very much.

"Look, never mind me," he said, when Oliver didn’t respond. "I’m just venting excess hot air. I don’t mean any of it. And I appreciate your being so willing to listen. I know how tedious it can be listening to someone complain  _ ad infinitum _ about their life..."

"Never forget I consider myself at least partly responsible for your predicament. Lending a sympathetic ear is the very least I owe you, but that isn’t the only reason why I’m here."

Aiden went still, the back of his neck prickling with some older deeper instinct. "No?"

"No." Oliver’s eyes slid closed. For a moment he looked older, more like the man Aiden met in Blackheath, as ground down by the whole bloody business as Aiden was himself. "Much like the Greeks, I come bearing dubious gifts. I have an offer for you from my superiors."

"What sort of offer?"

"What sort do you think? Needless to say, they believe it will solve all our problems in one fell swoop, and as much as I hate to admit it, there  _ is _ a chance they might be right."

"They want me to go back."

"Hear me out, at least. You left Blackheath three months ago. Has it got any easier?"

"Some days are harder than others."  _ And some days I wonder whether we really managed to escape at all. _

"It wouldn’t be to Blackheath," Oliver said. "Somewhere far nicer, with no rivals pitted against you, and the murdered party a thoroughly unpleasant chap who deserved everything he got by all accounts, bludgeoned to death in a locked room. You might even enjoy it."

Aiden was already shaking his head, curling his hands so tightly around the railing that his knuckles turned white. Flaking paint rasped against his sweat-dampened hand. "You can’t be serious," he said, his voice too loud, tight with rage. People were glancing their way. He caught himself and lowered his voice to a furious whisper. "Are you  _ mad _ ?"

"You’d be safe, Aiden," Oliver said quietly. "More to the point, she’d be safe."

"No.  _ No. _ "

"Are your memories coming back?"

He turned and stared at Oliver. There was a tight sensation around his throat, as though something was coiling around it, cutting off his air. "I love her," he said. "I’d never hurt her."

Oliver held his gaze, those sad blue eyes steady. "No," he agreed. "I’m sure you wouldn’t."

But that other Aiden, the Aiden who’d sacrificed his entire life to torture and torment her? If he returned, seeping back like poison...

"Why? They must be furious with me. Why would they make me this offer?"

"It’s a service as much as it is a punishment, remember? You solved one impossible crime. Why not another?"

"And locking Anna up again has nothing to do with it, I suppose?"

"Oh, I imagine that’s their primary motivation, but it wouldn’t be a punishment. Just..."

"A convenient method of disposal? I suppose we’re supposed to be grateful that they’re offering us the chance to Tommy and Tuppence our way through eternity. Is that the idea?"

"Something along those lines."

Aiden shook his head in disbelief. "All those loops, all those deaths… everything we went through, and for what? So we could willingly walk back into their cage? And they think we’d accept that? Tell them they can go to hell."

Oliver pushed his balled fists into the pockets of his trousers. To Aiden it seemed as if his expression had rearranged itself into something that looked very much like relief. "Well," he said, with a brisk, brittle cheerfulness. "I can’t say that I think it a wise decision, but I do hope it’s the right one, for both your sakes. You will tell Anna?"

"I’m certain she’ll say exactly the same thing."

"So am I, as it happens. But..."

"I’ll tell her. Of course I will." Something squirmed in his chest. He tried to imagine her reaction, her horrified revulsion, but could imagine nothing but the bitter taste of the words in his mouth, how his voice would tremble as he said them. "The answer will still be no. It might not be perfect, this world. It might be brash and vulgar, but at least it’s real."

"Aiden..." Oliver started, then stopped.

A fist of dread tightened about Aiden’s throat.  _ No, _ he thought, knowing that whatever Oliver was about to say would be something he did not want to hear. He looked at Oliver, gave a rough jerk of his head. Like ripping off a plaster, and clearly Oliver felt the same way because when he continued his voice was low and flat.

"You ought to know, Aiden, that you spent the first thirteen years of your life living in America. The west coast, I believe. It’s certainly possible your parents chose to fly to England to holiday in a quiet little seaside town on the south coast, but it does seem unlikely, wouldn’t you say?" He gripped Aiden’s arm and squeezed it, not unkindly. "Whomever those memories belong to, Aiden, I’m very much afraid it isn’t you."

** **

3.17 p.m.

When Aiden returned, he seemed different, his face darker somehow. He’d bought her flowers, a bouquet of roses and calla lilies which must have cost a fortune, and there was a flash of something in his eyes as he handed them over. He hid it quickly, but she was used to it and recognised it as what it was: confusion. She wasn’t the Anna he was expecting and never would be. She had grown accustomed to his changing faces, but he had only ever known her to wear one.

But it was gone almost at once, so she forgave him, or at least tucked away her hurt somewhere he’d never know about it, and she kissed him in thanks, a light peck on his lips which quickly deepened into something more as he responded, pressing close, the beautiful flowers crushed between them. She had to push him away, laughing, but his eyes lingered on hers and he seemed reluctant to let her go.

In the kitchen, she placed the flowers on the side, and pulled the vase out from the cupboard. It was so heavy it made her arms ache. She was much weaker than she used to be. It hadn’t just been her mind and memories that Blackheath had withered. She balanced the vase on the partition between the main sink and the smaller bowl and started to fill it with water.

Was he even aware of that flash of confusion, she wondered, and if he wasn’t could the same be true of her? Did the visceral fear she sometimes felt in his presence ever show in her eyes? Did it hurt him as much as his initial lack of recognition hurt her?

Her hands tightened around the neck of the vase. Another path she shouldn’t have wandered along. She saw Aiden, not this Aiden, but the one that frightened her, the way his smile first stiffened, then turned into a rictus grimace as his lips drew back to bare his clenched teeth. She closed her eyes, remembered the feel of his hand gripping on her shoulder, jerking her forward while his other hand jabbed into her stomach. He’d punched her, but not hard, and for a moment she’d simply been confused because it hadn’t even hurt… And then she’d felt the sticky wetness on her skin, and saw the glint of the blade, and Aiden was stumbling back, drawing the back of the hand that carried the knife across his mouth, smearing the lower half of his face with blood. His eyes were dark, detached. He looked drunk.

Remember this, she’d thought as her legs crumpled, and in a final act of indignity there was nothing she could do except cling to the man who’d just murdered her in cold blood like a child seeking comfort.

She glanced up at the window, trying to derail that particular train of thought.

Aiden was standing right behind her.

She cried out in sudden fear, and the heavy, half-full vase slipped from her fingers. It struck the front edge of the sink, spilling its contents and soaking the front of her skirt, and then it fell.

It seemed to drop in slow motion, and she could do nothing but stare at it in numbed dismay as it hit the floor and smashed, scattering shards of glass across the kitchen. She stared at the mess for a few moments, heart hammering, before she could bring herself to speak.

"Damn it," she said. "You made me jump."

"I’m sorry."

His voice seemed to come from very far away. Still dizzy with fear, she dropped to her knees and began to pick up the shards of glass. For a moment she considered that if he were to attack her, she could use one of the shards as a weapon, but when she cut herself he was nothing but kind, the touch of his hand comforting as he turned her palm up towards the light.

He had something to tell her, he said, and a serpent coiled tight around her heart. He said he loved her, and while he wasn’t exactly lying – in that at least she believed him – he was clearly hiding the truth about something. But then again, so was she. She’d spent most of the afternoon worrying at her old life as if it were a rotten tooth. She ought to tell him. She knew she wouldn’t. So came as a relief in a way that he was also concealing the truth from her.

It was like an ocean, her trust in him: she could have drowned herself in it.

** **

3.50 p.m.

Even if Anna had met someone on the track to the beach, it was unlikely that she would be recognised beneath the broad-brimmed sun hat and the sunglasses that concealed half her face. She wore a halterneck dress in pale blue cotton, with her swimming costume already on underneath.

On the beach she found a quiet spot and spread out her towel on the stones. She stripped to her costume and read for a while, smudging the pages with fingers greasy with sun-cream, until she’d had her fill of murder, and then she stripped to her costume and made her careful way towards the water. Stones the colour of duck eggs and the size of her fist shrank and darkened to a polished ochre, then finally gave way to sand. The tide was on its way out, and the incline sloped so gradually it felt like she might wade and wade forever and still the water would only ever reach as high as her thighs. The waves lapped gently against her legs, the sand sucking at her feet, and she thought for a moment of keeping going, of striking out away from the shore, and swimming until either she reached a far distant shore or her muscles gave out – whichever came first.

She dived underneath the surface, tasted salt-brine on her lips, drifts of seaweed brushing against her legs. The water was cool, welcoming after the baking heat. She rolled onto her back and floated, letting the waves rock her gently as she stared up at the glorious unchanging topaz blue of the sky, broken only by wisps of cloud.

When she looked towards the shore, Aiden was there.

He was sitting on her towel, in the sort of awkward pose that strongly suggested he was wishing for a deck chair. In fact, he looked so very uncomfortable that she laughed. He couldn’t have heard her, not from this distance, but he looked up anyway.

She found the bottom with her feet. She wasn’t quite out of her depth yet, although she’d gone out further than she realised. The waves caught at her, lifted her from her feet, then set her gently down again. She’d feel it afterwards, the rhythm of the waves, a muscle memory reflected in every cell of her body.

She hesitated, then started for the shore. As she waded out, the waves surged in a rush of foam around her ankles, as if the water wanted to snatch her back.

Aiden lifted his head from the book as she approached, but didn’t quite look at her.

_ Something’s wrong. _

"What did you really want to tell me?" she asked.

He looked at her then, stared up at her as if he was truly seeing her for the first time. Not the composite creature of Blackheath, set adrift in a world without consequences, or the Annabelle Caulker whom he must have known before, but the woman she was today, caught between mouse and monster, neither Anna nor Annabelle, and both more and less than both. He stared at her and didn’t seem to know what to say for the longest time, then, in a rush, as if he was afraid that if he didn’t speak out now he never would, he said, "I went back to Blackheath."

She felt the wind on her wet skin. The warmth of the day was ceding to the cooler air of the evening. Aiden picked up her spare towel from the bag and handed it to her. She wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl and sank onto the towel beside him. "By Blackheath, you mean..."

"The house. The real house."

"Was it what you expected?"

"Not in the slightest. Although I’m not sure what I expected. I think part of me was afraid I might stumble on a time machine hidden in one of the rooms and get sucked back to the 1920s again."

She smiled a little at this, although she could tell it wasn’t all he wanted to say. She looked at him and waited. Patience never used to come easy to her, but apparently Blackheath had beaten it into her.

"I’ve been meeting the Plague Doctor." he said, weighting the confession with the same significance he might have given to admitting an affair.

"I know."

He looked at her, startled. She shrugged.

"I’m not a fool, Aiden. Aside from me, he’s the only other soul you know. Although I’m surprised his bosses allow it."

"They like being able to keep tabs on us. But there’s something else..." He took a breath, forged on without looking at her, outlining in cold dispassionate terms the offer the Plague Doctor made him. Or tried to, but the dark undercurrent of bitterness in his voice was obvious. When he was finished, he snorted before she had the chance to reply. As if he wanted to deny her the chance to reply. "It’s a bloody insult. As if we would after everything we went through to escape."

Anna was silent for a long while. He looked at her, caught her eyes, looked quickly away in an unsuccessful attempt to hide the flash of dismay in his eyes. She nodded to herself, drew her knees up and wrapped her arms and the towel about them. "But you’re considering it."

"I’m doing no such thing."

"Aiden."

He exhaled slowly in frustration. "Oliver said something to me in Blackheath, about how I’d set out on a course of action and never veer from it no matter the likely outcome. He said I was  _ stubborn. _ "

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. He glanced at her, frowning, but with a twitch at the corner of his lips that suggested he was trying not to smile. She remembered shaving him that morning, nestled between his legs with his hands on her hips drawing her closer, pressing her close against the warm solid weight of his body. How safe he made her feel in the moments when she wasn’t afraid of him.

"In all fairness," she said, "you are stubborn. And I’m glad you are. If you weren’t, where would we be now?"

"Blackheath," he admitted.

She turned towards him, rested her hand on his leg. "You did that, Aiden."

"It wasn’t just me. I couldn’t have done it without you,"

"You wouldn’t have been there in the first place if it wasn’t for me." His eyes were on hers, crinkled at the corners and filled with warmth, and no matter how she searched she could find no trace of blame in them.

_ I know,  _ she wanted to tell him.  _ I know what I did, why I was sent there. I know everything. _ But that was a confession for another day.

"Do you want us to accept?" he said, sounding numb.

She shook her head and took his hand, linked her fingers through his. "I’m saying it doesn’t matter what I want. I’ll follow you, Aiden, no matter what. For as long and as far as you’ll have me."

"Forever," he said automatically and brought her hand up to his lips. He kissed her knuckles, a courtly gesture that first made her laugh and then brought warmth to her cheeks. "You know, he tried to make it sound enjoyable. Orders from on high, I assume."

"Aiden Bishop, the Great Detective."

He brushed her fingers over his top lip. "Perhaps I ought to grow a moustache. Or take up knitting." His humour swiftly faded and he squeezed her hand. "I don’t want to do it. I do trust Oliver, but I don’t trust _ them _ , and while I might not be sure how real any of this is, it’s still a damn sight better than anything we’re likely to find in Blackheath, or wherever the hell they intend to send us, but… I’m afraid, Anna."

"Of?"

"Of my memories coming back. Of what I might do to you. Or of what I  _ did  _ do. In Blackheath, before the final loop."

"Longer ago than that," she said. "Whatever you might have done, Aiden, it was decades ago."

His gaze met hers, pleading. He wanted to believe this so desperately. "You really believe that?"

She leaned in, pressed her forehead to his. "With all my heart," she lied.

** **

**Interlude**

** **

On their first night of freedom Aiden buys food from a Chinese takeaway, the sort of place with no seating except for a padded bench. Dizzied by the choices on the menu, he stares at it for a good five minutes straight, before ordering one of the set-meals, then stumbles out with a warm plastic bag filled with food bumping against his leg, and no clue what he’s just bought. No clue either whether he’ll find Anna waiting for him back at the hotel or if she’ll be in the wind.

She’s there.

They eat sitting on their separate beds, eyeing each other, trying to look like they’re not eyeing each other, and when they’re done eating the smell of the food lingers, filling the air with the sharp sweet twang of rice and pineapple and ginger. It takes them another half an hour to figure out how to work the television that clings to the wall like an obscene black eye, like some ancient mirror of obsidian. And when it’s on, it’s too bright. It makes his head pulse with the headache that has been gathering inside his skull for a while now, the healing wounds at his temples where their electrodes burrowed inside him stinging.

They bundle up the containers and throw them in the bathroom, then crawl into their separate beds. He thinks about what the Plague Doctor said, about how they have to keep running, and Aiden wonders whether they could really trust him, but right now he’s too exhausted to do anything else but crawl between the bedclothes, lay his head on the pillow, and try not to think about Anna in her own bed or listen to her breathing, the slight hitch that makes him wonder if she’s crying.

It’s probably also a mistake to go rooting around in his own memories, searching for the parts of himself that are missing. Trying to grasp them is like catching smoke trails; they dissipate to nothing.

Almost all he can remember is Blackheath. Dying. The frantic searing panic as his head is held underwater. Evelyn bringing the gun to her stomach. The sensation of a chess piece clutched tight in his palm.

But there is something else from the time before. A tiny fragile memory of Juliette as a child, perhaps seven or eight, sitting on a rock, hunched over her bent bare leg. There is a ragged gash in her knee, and she holds her palm skywards, showing him a smeared slash of blood across it. Her hair falls over her face. A rime of salt on his skin, the rush and surge of the waves, the wind snatching at his hair.

Anna stirs. The bedclothes rustles as she sits up. "Aiden? Are you awake?"

"I’m awake."

She perches on the edge of her bed, a shadow in silhouette, this woman who is all but a stranger to him. He barely knows anything about, and yet he feels as if he knows her better than anyone in the world.

Well, of course he does. It strips you back, Blackheath, reduces you to the essence of a person. Until there’s nothing left but your soul.

So he hopes, anyway.

Slowly, his mouth dry, he pulls back the covers.

Maybe he’s the sort of man who’d wait, but it seems like she isn’t that sort of woman, because she makes a soft sound and slips in beside him. She still smells institutional, of cheap astringent shower gel, but beneath that he can smell her skin, her hair. There is a frozen moment as they both readjust, and then she rolls towards him, finding his cheek and turning his head towards her so she can bring her lips to his. At first the kiss is slow and cautious, and then it’s neither, and they’re both grasping at each other in the clumsy off-kilter rhythm of lovers who aren’t quite used to one another yet. For whom it’s been a while. Thirty years, say.

She straddles him, and he slides his hands up under her t-shirt to find her breasts while she rolls her hips, rubbing herself against the outline of his erection through his boxer shorts. He closes his eyes, pictures Grace in a sudden treacherous flash of desire. He reels away from that image, dizzy and painfully aroused, grasps desperately for Anna, but the only version he sees in his mind’s eye is the Anna from Blackheath.

"Wait," he manages as she reaches in through the fly of his boxer shorts and frees him. " _ Wait _ \--" But since he still has his hands on her breasts it’s fair to say this lacks conviction. She stills, her hand curled loosely around him.

"Wait for  _ what _ , Aiden?"

"We’re not… I mean… Shouldn’t we, uh…" Any rational arguments he might have had seemed to be crumbling. Maybe he isn’t the sort of man who’d choose to wait. Damn it, he must have been such an arsehole.

Her hand rests on the back of his head, exerting a gentle pressure to bring his face closer to the breast still cupped in his hand. He spreads his fingers, catches the nipple between them and pinches ever so slightly. Anna’s hips twitch towards him. His parted lips brush against his knuckles through the t-shirt and he fights the urge to groan, to press his tongue to the cotton.

"I can’t get pregnant if that’s what you’re worried about." Her voice is matter-of-fact. "Not for a while, at least. They explained it all to me. A side effect of being in cryo for so long. It takes the reproductive system time to recover."

Dear God. He hadn’t even considered that.

Her hand slide along the length of him, and this time he can’t stop himself from groaning. Her other hand drops, fingers running lightly over the head. Her nipple grazes against his lips through the t-shirt, and he closes his mouth around it and sucks, soaking the fabric with saliva, determined that at any moment he’ll drop his head back and say the gentlemanly thing like: ‘Are you sure?’ But she’s shifting position, and while it probably isn’t too late to do anything about it, in practice it might as well be, because she’s positioning him at her entrance, and then oh god he’s inside her and she’s moving against him, rolling her hips with a rhythmic downwards motion, and Aiden knows with certainty that of all the things he used to be in this life beyond Blackheath, a gentleman sure as hell isn’t one of them.

He sits up, raking at her t-shirt to bare her breasts, and curves his arm around her lower back, pulling her harder onto him.

"Oh god,  _ Aiden _ ."

Her movements are uncontrolled, her hands knotting in his hair, her voice breathy and soft, and every movement she makes brings him closer to his peak.

He grips her backside, grinding her hips against his while he buries his face in the hollow of her neck, smells the scent of her skin beneath the astringent soap. It seems like he’s known that scent his entire life, as if this moment is what his whole existence had been leading up to: him and Anna, this anonymous hotel, this too-narrow bed.

When she orgasms, her head drops back, and her hips give one last spasm against him. He captures her mouth with his, kisses her fiercely, swallows up her cries as if he could drink her up that way, every last drop.

And when the crisis has passed, he rolls her back on the bed and kisses her tenderly while she hooks her legs around his and urges him onwards to his own peak. Despite his bone-deep exhaustion, he’s dizzy with lust, picturing all the things he could do to her, that she could do to him, and he comes with all those images in his mind, all the many and varied ways they can pleasure each other and all the time they have to do it in.

An entire lifetime’s worth. Or however long it is that they have left.

He wakes in the night from a nightmare, then lies back down, the beat of his heart pulsing in the hollow of his throat. There is a moment when he’s convinced he’s back in Blackheath, that he’s woken in the body of another host, then his eyes adjust and he becomes aware of the unwinking red eye of the television set and of Anna’s body beside him. Either he woke her up or she never fell asleep. She wraps her arm around his chest, and he searches her out in the darkness, chasing away the nightmare with kisses. She strokes his hair, rests her head on his shoulders, and although she doesn’t speak, the question lingers unspoken between them.

He doesn’t have to answer it. He can’t do anything but.

"I dreamed I was back at Blackheath," he says, speaking slowly into the darkness, feeding it as if it were a hungry thing. "It wouldn’t let me go."

"Well, you’re not," she says. "And it has. You’re safe, Aiden. You’re free. You escaped."

"We escaped," he says, and the crushing weight of fear on his chest seems to lift away, as if he hadn’t quite believed they were free until that moment. "And we’re never going back."


End file.
